October 25, 2011

75's across the board

I never previously blogged about my HIST 201 paper, primarily because it is a boring subject to blog about, and in our day and age, blogs are by far the most boring thing to read. But if I'm still keeping your eyes glued to your glowing screens, here I go: There was a paper in HIST 201 that focused on two articles arguing about the Great Depression. I had to analyze them and see which article made the stronger argument.

While working on the paper itself, I was consistently mixing up citations, repeating paragraphs and plaguing the paper with fragments far more evident than I ones I make when I try to make friends. By now, some people's eyebrows have risen far enough to reveal a crease or two on their forehand. The sole thought of that is undeniably odd. Not the citations, please, or messing up the paper, but that I could have more fragments from a paper than ending being tongue-tied while talking.

In the end, after pessimistically pondering how poor I was going to do on the paper, I, of course, ended up in a grey space: earning a 75% on the paper. Worthy of a C. That alone is nothing worth boasting about, nor being ashamed about, especially given my novice collegiate experience.

The whole reason I'm even bothering to blog about this, other than a pointless personal record I'll inevitably reminisce over, is the bizarre..."coincidences" that came with the grades on the New Deal essays in my class. I spoke to literally about nine or ten people around me, and all but one of them earned a 75% as well on the essay. For those of us dying to know the outlying statistic, the lone outcast earned an 85%. But of those people, every single kid I conversed with within my learning community (I'll delve into what that is some other time, in the mean time just work with me here) earned an identical grade on their paper, and had strikingly similar styles of teacher (assistant) feedback.

I'm not denying that they did not throughly examine the paper, but it seems unusually suspect that such a large sampling upwards of a few dozen, would all end up with identical grades, and receive similar feedback. Even though college paper criteria is differently graded than high school, since college papers seem to focus on interpretation more so than strength of writing style, it seems highly unlikely every person took the same identical approach and contained the same errors to relegate their grade to a "C" level, nor had enough points of identical strength to obtain a passing grade.